“Then they’re stupid,” he replied. “Look, get ready and then hopefully it will all be for nothing. But if it isn’t...”
He let this thought trail off, even as I waited for him to finish. Finally I said, “Are you scared?”
“I’m concerned,” he said. Another phone rang. “And busy, so I should go, even though only morons think they can get storm windows put in before this afternoon. I just wanted to make sure you were safe. I’ll call again later, okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And you’ll be at the dinner, right? At six?”
“Sure,” he assured me, but he sounded so distracted I wondered if he’d even heard my question. “Talk to you soon.”
When I hung up, Tracy turned her head, looking at me over her sunglasses. “Everything okay?”
I nodded. “Roo’s just worried about the storm.”
She tilted her head back, looking up at the blue sky, white clouds drifting across it. “It hardly looks like hurricane weather, though, does it?”
When I shook my head, she stretched out, then loweredher sunglasses again. But the truth was, behind the Tides, over the trees, I could now see a row of darker clouds, shorter and squatter, piling up on the horizon. As I lay back, I called on my imagination to picture us all at dinner that night, with oyster forks and candles, Mimi and Nana and Bailey and Roo. But when I closed my eyes, all I could see were those clouds. By the time we left the pool an hour later, there were even more of them.
At four p.m., I was sitting at the table with Nana, looking out at the sky. By then, it was dark as dusk.
“Looks ominous,” she observed mildly. She turned to my dad, who was watching the TV, now all storm coverage. “Should we double-check with the hotel that dinner is still going to happen?”
“They’re saying they’ll be fine no matter what the weather does,” he replied, not taking his eyes off the screen, where the reporter in the windbreaker from earlier was being thrashed by rain and wind as he tried to describe the conditions. “But I’m wondering if we should have a shelter plan, just to be safe.”
“Roo says so,” I told him as I yet again tried Roo’s number, only to have it ring and ring before going to voicemail. It was the same with Bailey. “We need to be downstairs, away from windows.”
“You’d think they’d set upsomething,” my dad muttered, walking over to the phone in the kitchen. “I’ll call down, see what’s happening.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Nana told me. “If the dinner gets canceled, we’ll reschedule.”
But for the last few hours, I hadn’t been thinking about the dinner anymore. It was Mimi’s house and Calvander’s that were on my mind: that big kitchen, with the shiny toaster. The gardenia bushes by the door. Each of those rooms I’d learned to clean, the tiny fold on the toilet paper at the beginning of a roll. I’d just gotten it all back. What if it was lost for good?
My phone rang then, startling me after so long of not being able to reach anyone. I jumped on it like it was alive. “Hello?”
“Can you get over here? Do you have a car?”
Trinity. She sounded like she was moving, her voice coming in and out. “What’s wrong?”
“I just want to be at the hospital,” she said, her voice breaking. “If this baby decides to come during the storm, I swear to God I will clamp my legs SHUT. I want my fucking epidural!”
Nana glanced over at me. Whoops. I stood up, putting some distance between us before saying, “Are you having contractions?”
“No,” she said, “but I’m so uncomfortable and I can feel the barometric pressure dropping. Storms make weird things happen, and I do not want my kid to be one of them.”
I looked at my dad, who was on hold with the front desk, still watching the TV. Outside, I could see several Tidesemployees in white golf shirts hurriedly folding up the chairs on the beach.
“I have a car,” I said. “But I don’t think—”
At first, I didn’t recognize the sound she made in response to this. Then I realized it was a sob. “I just can’t do this, I’m already alone without the Sergeant and everyone’s freaking out here. Even if I just sit in the hospital parking lot, I’ll feel better, I swear to God, I’ll walk there if I have to....”
“Can you call Roo?” I asked, turning my back to Nana and my dad. “Or Vincent?”
“Everyone’s at the Station,” she wailed. Good God. “Mimi and Oxford boarded up the hotel windows and went to help down there—it always needs a ton of storm prep. So it’s just me and Gordon here, and she was all nervous, so I yelled at her, and now she’s God knows where feeling sorry for herself, even though she is NOT a million years pregnant.”
I heard a beep: another call coming in. Bailey. “Hold on,” I said to Trinity, who was sniffling in my ear. “I’ve got Bailey on the other line.”
“Tell her to get over here and take me to the hospital!” she yelled, loud enough to make my dad, halfway across the room, turn and look at me.
“One sec,” I said in my best measured voice, to compensate for her near hysteria. Then I clicked over. “Bailey?”
